One in every three California residents supports the most populous U.S. state’s peaceful withdrawal from the union … The 32 percent support rate is sharply higher than the last time the poll asked Californians about secession, in 2014, when one-in-five or 20 percent favored it … The concept has even earned a catchy name – “Calexit”.

California is not likely to secede from the union. But if it did, what sort of country would it be?

If the United States wants to be a successful powerhouse, we should follow the example set by one of the worst regimes on the face of the Earth. That’s the message from California Governor Jerry Brown, who seems to be enraptured with the way Chinese President Xi Jinping is getting things done:

I met with president Xi for almost an hour. This is a very determined man. He’s building roads and high-speed rail and not just in China, but all over the world. Washington can’t even build roads and bridges in our own country, much less spreading the American dream all around the world. If we’re going to be the great power we all want to be, we’re going to have to start rolling up our sleeves, raising some revenue and getting the job done.

Well, it sounds like Governor Moonbeam has a new hero. … And all he had to do was ignore the fact that Xi Jinping is the iron-fisted ruler of a fascist, one-party, communist state with a list of human rights abuses long enough to choke an elephant.

I mean, seriously, just how stupid must one be to make a claim like the one Jerry Brown is making? Is the Governor of California unaware that much of China’s economics-free approach to expansion is built on the backs of slave labor? Does he not know about the horrors of the “reform through labor” system that was created by Mao and still exists to this day?

In 2014, at the National Review, Josh Gelernter described the horrors:

The camps are called “laogai,” a contraction of “láodòng gǎizào,” which means “reform through labor”. They were conceived under Mao; unlike Stalin’s gulags, they never closed — though the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] has tried to abolish the name “laogai.” In the Nineties, it re-designated the camps “prisons”. The conditions, though, don’t seem to have changed.

Our picture of life in the laogai is murky, but here’s what has been reported: The prisoners are given uniforms and shoes. They have to purchase their own socks, underwear, and jackets. There are no showers, no baths, and no beds. Prisoners sleep on the floor, in spaces less than a foot wide. They work 15-hour days, followed by two hours of evening indoctrination; at night they’re not allowed to move from their sleeping-spots till 5:30 rolls around, when they’re woken for another day of hard labor. Fleas, bedbugs, and parasites are ubiquitous. The prisoners starve on meager supplies of bread, gruel, and vegetable soup. Once every two weeks they get a meal of pork broth.

We do not doubt that the prisoners are very badly treated, but we doubt that that description is accurate. Grown men could not survive on such a diet, especially if they do hard physical labor for 15 hours a day. Bedbugs where there are no beds? Well, possibly. No washing? Hmmm.

The camps currently billet between 3 and 5 million convicts — real criminals along with thought criminals guilty of opposing Communism, promoting freedom, or practicing religion — though the process doesn’t wait on [judicial] conviction; Chinese law permits the police to hold anyone for four years before judicial proceedings. At any given time — according to the Laogai Research Foundation — 500,000 Chinese citizens are in “arbitrary detention”. If a prisoner does get a hearing, he enters a legal system controlled, capriciously, by the Communist Party.

The laogai camps are estimated to have held between 40 and 50 million prisoners since they opened in 1949. Which is about the population of South Korea. Between 15 and 20 million of those prisoners died or were killed. Which is two or three times the population of Hong Kong. Or to put it another way: Between 50 and 300 thousand people were murdered during Japan’s rape of Nanking. China’s Communist Party has inflicted between 50 and 400 Nanking massacres on the country it dominates. According to an article published in Human Events by a man named Michael Chapman, a large proportion of Chinese exports originate in the camps — a quarter of China’s tea, tens of thousands of tons of grain.

Prisoners mine asbestos and other toxic chemicals with no protective gear, work with batteries and battery acid with no protection for their hands, tan hides while standing naked in vats filled three feet deep with chemicals used for the softening of animal skins, and work in improperly run mining facilities where explosions and other accidents are a common occurrence.

They stand naked in vats filled with chemicals used for softening animal skins? And their own skins are not dissolved?

And that work finds its way into American and European stores. A quick Internet search will yield photos of notes slipped into Chinese products on sale everywhere from Kmart to Saks. Notes begging for help, signed by Chinese slaves. One that turned up in Northern Ireland says, “We work 15 hours every day and eat food that wouldn’t even be fed to pigs and dogs.” It was written in Chinese. One that turned up in Oregon was written in English. “People who work here have to work 15 hours a day without Saturday, Sunday break and any holidays. Otherwise, they will suffer torturement.” …

The writer of that note identifies himself as a worker in the Masanjia labor camp. Former Masanjia inmates have been interviewed by the New York Times. …

The New York Times? Prepared to give a Communist regime adverse publicity? A flying pig moment!

… They described “frequent beating, days of sleep deprivation, and prisoners chained up in painful positions for weeks on end.” One told the Times, “Sometime the guards would drag me around by my hair or apply electric batons to my skin for so long the smell of burning flesh would fill the room.” …

Chained up in painful positions for weeks on end? Living flesh subjected to burning for long periods? Again, hmmm. Human beings are frail. Especially if they’re starving. How likely is it that even strong healthy men could survive such treatment? The article says that many don’t. But it also suggests that some do, at least long enough to write notes and slip them into exported goods.

And remember: The camps’ prisoners are just the formal slaves. In a more general sense, all of China’s one and a third billion people are slaves …

That we know to be true.

Even if this description is full of exaggeration or outright falsehoods, it is true that Communist China is a vile country governed by a cruel regime. Communism is never anything but cruel. It cannot ever be anything but cruel. And if this description deters California from emulating it under the leadership of Jerry Brown, may it be widely read in his state.